Charles Edward Mudie

Charles Edward Mudie ( born October 18, 1818 in Chelsea, † October 28, 1890 ) was a British bookseller and founder of Mudie 's Select Library.

Life

Charles Mudie was the son of a London book and newspaper dealer. In 1840 he founded his own publishing trade in Bloomsbury and published, among other texts by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In 1842 he expanded his business from a lending library and evolved with its select Library within a few years the largest commercial lenders British book. Through the use of an extensive distribution network and modern means of transport such as railways and steam ships, he sent his books in its characteristic metal -clad standard containers soon to subscribers even beyond the borders of the British Empire beyond.

The lending library was so successful that in a larger building in Oxford Street moved in 1852, where she remained for more than half a century and has become one of the landmarks of London.

1879 died Mudies eldest son Charles Henry, whom he had appointed as his successor in the company and who was eight years earlier gone into operation. From this loss to Mudie never quite recovered, and in the following years he withdrew more and more from the daily business back until it finally in 1884 his position to his younger son Arthur handed and adopted completely out of the business.

By the end of the 19th century, the existence of the Select Library had grown to over seven million volumes, even if constantly old title was excreted from the camps and sold second-hand. At the time of Mudies death in 1890, but already new developments such as the increasing emergence of publicly funded libraries and cheaper paperback editions had initiated the demise of the company that the literary scene dominated England for more than half a century.

Importance

Mudies Select Library was responsible with their rapid growth for the closure of many smaller commercial libraries that could not compete with the low prices and the great selection of items. This led to a concentration of industry in the hands of a few financially strong company and a centralization of book rental from London.

Mudies company was the largest and therefore most influential lending library with distance. He used this influence to make his ideas of good literature feed, even though, was based on the time of the founding of its Select Library prevailing morality. Mudies library soon became known for their conservative practices and has long been a bulwark of Victorian values ​​.

For logistical and financial reasons, he favored the enforcement of already known for several years, three -volume novel format, also called triplane, and influenced by its dominant market position, the UK's leading publishing houses. This preference for the expensive, three-volume, bound Prestige editions for decades led to artificially high -powered book prices and correspondingly small editions. Readers should be encouraged to borrow books instead of buying them. Thus, the large lending libraries the main customers of the publishers were fine literature. A title that was rejected by Mudie for its program or acquired only in small numbers, had little chance to be a financial success. This led to frequent accusations that he censored the English literature.

The dominance of the three-decker had a significant impact on the prose literature of an entire literary epoch. Many major Victorian novelists such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy wrote almost exclusively triplane novels that posed special requirements on the content and structure of the novels with their average 900 pages in length and its three-volume publication form.